I just realized I promised Pie I would compare the keynotes at Momentum for him, since he couldn’t be there, so here’s a post about that.
There was some discussion before the opening keynote whether Mark Lewis was going to show up at all, since the rumor was that he had been promoted out of the way, but he was there giving the opening keynote. Rick Devenuti, the new EMC IIG Division chief presented the closing keynote.
There’s some good and bad in my comments, so if you like only the good things in life, you should skip the next paragraph.
The bad: I have to agree with Lee Smith, would concluded in an article about the keynote that a real ECM vision was lacking from Mark’s keynote. I understand that customers who had come to here about ECM were disappointed.
The good: if you’re willing to look beyond the above, then it wasn’t that bad at all. Mark had a lot more energy than in his keynote at EMC World last year. Last year he was explaining what a cloud was to us all and he really looked like Joe Tucci had personally made him do it. Now he was looking like he was telling his own story. One about the future of IT as he sees it. And he had some good points. for instance: Firewalls are no longer a usefull paradigm in the context of information security. More and more users are buying their own devices (iPads, Android phone, etc) and are expecting to be able to use them for private and business functions. With all these devices connecting to your business information in more and more diverse ways, firewalls are just not going to cut it, nor are VPN’s. That was a bit of an eye opener for me. Mark didn’t really present a solution though. I came up with IRM, but that comes from me, not him.
So, not at all compared to previous keynotes, but we know he’ll never be a presenter like Whitney.
Finally, a comparison with the keynote Rick Devenuti gave later that day. I’ll be brief. The good was the first part, where Rick spoke about the operational changes they’ve implemented in the previous year and the focus they’ve had on the quality of the product (refering to the 6.6 release that is mostly providing bug fixes and preformance/stability improvements). The rest of the speech just made me feel like I was hearing Mark last year. Uninspired and lacking any vision. Too bad.
